As the springtime blossoms and sunny weather returns to our grey skies it’s a fantastic time to start working on your fighting skills. No matter where you are in your journey as a fighter, regular practice, especially on the fundamentals of strikes, blocks, range and footwork is your strongest tool for improvement. If you want to get better this season, you owe it to yourself to make some practice time in your life, whether that’s working on footwork drills at the bus stop, working your pell after you get home from work, making an effort to make regular practice events, sparing your friends, or just stretching and working out regularly. And there’s more to foam fighting than just shot mechanics -- especially in mixed unit field fights. Toss in our armor and magic rules and we’ve got a game with quite a bit of strategic and tactical depth that can be pretty overwhelming for the uninitiated.

To encourage your practice and refine your game, I’m going to be putting out a series of posts about battlefield tactics, focusing on basics like battlefield roles, classes in Dargarth, and what to pay attention to before lay on or before a duel.

It is my hope that these articles can help people new to our game better understand how battles play out and what sort of role they would like to play as well as improve the level of our fighting more broadly.

I’ll be the first to admit: I am not the best foam fighter. I’m not the most skilled, or the fastest or the most practiced or even the most clever -- and so while I’m putting out the effort to write these posts, I hope that you’ll take these as a starting point for wider discussions.